Modern Chiropractic Techniques : Fascia

Fascia is a modern Chiropractic Technique

Allow your body to better resist through the years!

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world, and that is an idea whose time has come" So said the genius Victor Hugo! Now, he might not have had Fascia in mind when he wrote this, but I am certain he would have nodded his head in agreement, given the chance!

How can 'fascia' treatments help you?

You should only be concerned with this 'fascia' if you happen to be an average human being made up of flesh and blood (and ground substance) and have the average malfunctions that humans seem to be inflicted with.

How is 'fascia' working on your body?

Probably the most fascinating thing about 'fascia' is that it is capable of changing from one state to another in minutes. Not in days, not in weeks. ln minutes.

It can change from a liquidy gel to a solid bundle in minutes when exposed to trauma, stress, or high impact. And it can stay in this form forever if ignored. But it can also be reversed to its liquidy form again with the correct treatment!

How is that possible?

To answer that we simply HAVE to look at a couple of anatomical facts. Most of you would be bored to tears if I went into a lenghty scientific story about the where, why, and how. It would actually be fascinating too, but I shall spare you the details. Let's just say that' fascia' has a part to it that is called "ground substance".

Fascia is connective tissue because it connects us together. Connective tissue is composed of collagen, elastin, (and yes the stuff is elastic) and the ground substance. Collagen provides strength, Elastin provides elasticity and Ground Substance provides the medium - the gel-medium that the rest is submerged in.

It lubricates the collagen and the elastin and the muscle fibres, so that they can slide over one another without friction (when you have a fascial problem, you can sometimes maybe feel a creaking sensation, or sort of a friction between the muscles and tendons).

The ground substance is extremely hydrophilic - it loves water, and contains a lot of it - allowing it to absorb the compressive forces of movement. And it is designed to absorb shock and disperse it throughout the body (imagine bouncing the walls of a plasic swimrninq pool on the side and watching the shock of the impact disperse throuqhout the whole pool because of the water).

With fascial restriction the forces cannot be dispersed properly and areas of the body are subjected to an intolerable impact: INJURY. This explains the sports and performance injuries that reoccur despite extensive therapy and strenghtening and flexibility proqrarns. An athlete with fascial restrictions will not efticiently absorb the shocks of continued activity. The body absorbs too much pressure in too small an area and during performance the body keeps "breakinq down".

If I put a string around your ear and kept pulling ever so gently, you would with time develop an inflammation in the area that is being pulled. They say that you can move a boat in water with your index finger, if you push long enough. Repeated demand! Same is true, of course, with fascia. Depending on the area of the body the fascia has the power to pull or squeeze quite forcefully. I have had the unfortunate opportunity to experience just how forcefully, having had patients come in to my cIinic in great distress with fascia sqeezing either a nerve in the leg, sciatic or similar type nerve, or in the arm. This scenario can also happen with disc protrusions, but often it is the fascia that is to blame.

Fascia covers the muscles, bones, nerves, organs, and vessels down to the cellular level. Therefore, malfunction of the system due to trauma, poor posture or inflammation can bind down the fascia, resulting in abnormal pressure on any or ail of these body components. Restrictions of the fascia can create pain or malfunction throughout the body, sometimes with bizarre side eftects and seemingly unrelated symptoms that do not always follow any logic. These powerful fascial restrictions begin to pull the body out of its three-dimensional alignment with the vertical gravitation axis, causing biomechanically ineftecient, highly energy-consuming movement and posture. It is imperative that our structure have the ability to respond appropriately to our gravitational field as it plunges down through us. Ideally, we should be balanced around the vertical axis of this constant gravit y, otherwise, imbalance almost always shortens the body and increases the expenditure of energy. And we are talking a lot of energy that is being uselessly spent on these imbalances.

Myofascial release treatment, along with therapeutic exercise, improve the vertical alignment and lenghten the body, providing more space for the proper functioning of osseous structures (like your spine) nerves, blood vessels and organs. Remember that organs can be squeezed the same way that everything else cano If fascia has tightened and is creating symptoms distant from the injury, ail of the appropriate localized treatments will produce poor or temporary results because the imbalance and excessive pressure from the myofascial tightness remain untreated.

Remember also that fascial restrictions do not show up on x-rays or MRI's. It is invisible to these otherwise advanced investigations. Water in whatever form it is presented in cannot be viewed by these explorative measures. X-rays and MRI's are helpless in this investigation because they are static in their approach to exploring the body, and fascia is a living, moving tissue and its function has to be explored in motion. This is done with the finest, most sophisticated apparatus known to man: the human hand. The educated and trained human hand.

As we get older and fascia restrictions accumulate we get stifter and stifter. Flexibility programs and massage only helps temporarily because they most often only takes care of part ofthe problem. The fascia part usually remains. The same is the case with chiropractie when fascia is involved with the symptoms. The cIassic error being the therapist focusing on the site of pain exclusively and treating it where it manifests. But as it happens, many pains are referrred to joints from other sites, sometimes from completely unrelated areas. The reason being that fascia is a web that covers everything and does not care about anatomy books.

The myofascial release treatment techniques are therefore performed in conjunction with specific symptomatic treatment. The gentle tractioning forces applied to the fascial restrictions will ellicit heat that increases bloodflow to the aftected area, help lymphatic drainage of toxic metabolic wastes, reset fascial planes in the body. The increased temperature sort of melts the fascia and regresses it back to its natural gel state. And the tissues that before were exposed to a constant pull, can now again return to a normal function. And the pain disappears.

So if you are in pain and treatments of various types has failed to give you relief, maybe you should give the fascia a thought. Maybe it could be the secret to a successful end to your pain.